Performance evaluation of the TFD-capable dynamic QoS assurance of HD video streaming in well-dimensioned network

Abstract

The Traffic Flow Description (TFD) option of the IP protocol is an experimental option, designed by the Authors and described by the IETF’s Internet Draft. This option was intended for signalling for QoS purposes. Knowledge about forthcoming traffic (such as the amount of data that will be transferred in a given period of time) is conveyed in the fields of the option between end-systems. TFD-capable routers on a path (or a multicast tree) between the sender and receiver(s) are able to read this information, process it and use it for bandwidth allocation. If the time horizons are short enough, bandwidth allocation will be performed dynamically. In the paper a performance evaluation of an HD video transmission QoS assured with the use of the TFD option is presented. The analysis was made for a variable number of video streams and a variable number of TCP flows that compete with the videos for the bandwidth of the shared link. Results show that the dynamic bandwidth allocation using the TFD option better assures the QoS of HD video than the classic solution, based on the RSVP protocol.